Avery Gordon’s work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2008) calls for other sociologists to take up haunting as a serious critical analytic. Engaging with this haunting necessitates us to not think of history as a series of completed discrete events, but to rather look for how past social traumas find themselves reappearing long after the initial traumatic event has passed. Sometimes subtle, often explicit, these violent histories create ghosts that demand attention and redress. This phenomenon differs from trauma because it “produc[es] something-to-be-done” (Gordon xvi). This “something-to-be-done” operates on individual, social, political, and historical levels. To employ haunting as an analytic means questioning our traditional modes of knowledge production that value distinct binaries (past/present, subject/object) and look towards what Foucault calls subjugated knowledges –d knowledges that are repressed within these traditional modes of production (Gordon xviii).

While Gordon explores how both psychoanalytic and Marxist analysis engage with haunting to varying degrees and may be applied towards haunted archives, she posits that looking at haunting through literature allows for a greater flexibility in methodology; the literary does not have to abide by the restrictions of history, sociology, or other social sciences. These restrictions are often arbitrary and misleadingly so. Gordon writes:

the division of the disciplines separates literature (story/fiction) and social science (fact) … [the division] is an uneasy one, however; the border is not quite as secure as institutional mandates presume. Not only is the origin of sociology as a unique discipline bound up with its relationship to literature (see Lepenies 1988), but sociology’s dominant disciplinary methods and theoretical assumptions constantly struggle against the fictive (25).

The dismissal of the fictive denies the role that narrative plays in constructing history and our understandings of social and cultural analysis. Dealing with ghosts, the repressed, and the traumatic histories they carry requires going beyond what is readily accessible to scholars working in conventional archives. As haunting calls us to consider the imbrication of the personal, the social, and the political, we must reconsider the types of questions we ask when confronting capital letter topics such as Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Poverty. How do these change when we consider ghosts, those invisible forces, as empirical evidence? As a pioneering text of its time, Gordon’s work leaves us with as many questions as answers. However, other scholars have answered her initial call to rethink disciplinary bounds.

Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (2008) can be read as Grace Cho’s contribution to that call. She looks particularly towards the transgenerational haunting of the Korean diaspora, examining what conditions made such ghosts like the figure of the yanggongju[1] possible and proposes ways we may work to name and release the han[2] she embodies. Cho extends Gordon’s work by turning to the “hallucinatory” and “schizophrenic” as modes of interacting with and trying to understand these archives. Gordon’s work serves as a touchpoint for Cho to apply a haunting framework across various media forms and disciplines to understand a history that operates beyond conventional archival bounds. Cho’s engagement with trauma through diasporic Korean media and sociological data foregrounds the need to be attentive to the gaps within both American and Korean official histories of the Korean War since these gaps require a new mode of seeing. This new mode of seeing deals with the excesses of trauma, of repeated violence, and of systematic erasures that render subjects voiceless and their stories unnarrativizable. Cho also engages with the body as it manifests in the ghostly figure of the yanggongju whose specter continues to haunt the Korean diaspora in narratives about the American Dream and the resultant model minority myth surrounding Korean Americans. Her body has taken on many iterations and connotations from her “comfort woman” predecessor to the Yankee whore, UN lady, and GI bride. Her body acts as the geopolitical battleground for US and Korean relations, the traumas of military occupation, and militarized sex work. She is characterized by her present absence where she is simultaneously the “invisible backbone of the Korean American community” that made immigration possible for many of her relatives and the figure pushed to the shadowy margins by that same community for her deep social stigma (Cho 140).

Cho’s understanding of haunting acknowledges that seeing in the conventional sense, along with archival methodologies that rely on said type of sight, would be insufficient in approaching such ghosts. She challenges us to question our perceptions and engage critically with hallucinations, “performing a phantomatic return, through a multiplicity of voices and altered repetitions of past experiences” to better see trauma (Cho 167). The word repetition is crucial here as a characteristic of haunting and traumatic experiences more broadly. The repetition of the past in the present and of the past into the future dislocates these diasporic subjects, rendering them outside of time and constantly wandering but never arriving. Along with listening to the voices, Cho also asserts that a “schizophrenic” mode of memory is normal “for a diasporic memory that is in constant displacement and that reverberates with the voices of haunted histories” (186). She takes on this schizophrenic mode of memory and meaning making through her own writing style. By seamlessly combining multiple forms of evidence such as sociological data, autobiography, testimony, literature, and other media productions, she engages with the haunting of the Korean diaspora. She purposefully obscures the sources of the vignettes sprinkled throughout the chapters to demonstrate the porosity of diasporic memory and to protect the anonymity of those sharing their experiences of militarized sex work. While this point is only briefly touched on, it is important to highlight, as the question is often asked of how we can engage with the archive without reproducing its violence. Cho’s decision to secure the anonymity of her contributors prioritizes the wishes of those whose experience is being archived. As a writing experiment, her book recreates this porous and fluid diasporic consciousness through its imperfect and reconfigured repetitions, from the stories without identified authors to her own experiences being told through other voices. This occurs both through the content and through the book’s visual presentation, as the vignettes are sometimes framed in gray boxes and at other times, float freely on the page interspersed with historic photographs and art exhibitions from diasporic subjects. Cho creates an intelligible whole from the fragments that may otherwise be illegible on their own.

Archives are tools that can produce narratives that have material effects. The harm of traumatic social events may propagate into the present if the official archives and histories surrounding those events suppress the victims of both physical and psychological violence. These texts are two examples of a growing body of work that seeks to address difficult histories that elude traditional research methodologies and implore us to ask what it means to look at haunted archives, which may mean transgressing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these archives both ethically and empathetically.

Works Cited

“archive, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/10416.

Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008.

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008.

[1] Literally “Western princess,” but Cho explains that it “broadly refers to a Korean woman who has sexual relations with Americans…most often used pejoratively to refer to a woman who is a prostitute for the U.S. military” (Cho 3).

[2] Unresolved grief and rage (Cho 16).

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As I’ve discussed in my last two posts, I recently visited the Rubenstein Library at Duke University to complete research on the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers. Visiting the archive helped me reorient myself towards my subject matter – the life and work of Abraham Joshua Heschel – and gave a much-needed boost of energy and excitement into my project at a time in the academic year – Spring Break – where my zeal for academic works often wanes in favor of other, more plebian pursuits (like sleeping a lot).

I struggle with academic labor. It’s not something that comes naturally or easily to me (although I’m not sure academia is an easy field for anyone!). But, as someone who struggles with anxiety and depression, I often find both the individualistic nature of academic work and the reliance of one’s own thoughts to be a paradoxical recipe for disaster.

My depression and anxiety have been rearing their ugly head this year. It felt like it snuck up on me: I didn’t notice that these parts of my health were getting worse until I realized it was hard for me to drum up the energy to shower more than two times a week. Instead, I just wanted to sit in bed and tremble and worry. So I told myself I needed to shower more – every other day at minimum – and that self-imposed rule helped me.

“Getting outside of yourself” or “thinking about other people instead of yourself” are both adages for dealing with depression and anxiety. I suspect some people hate hearing this, as it may not be helpful for everyone. But this line of thinking (alongside medication and therapy, I should add) does help me. Get up. Move. Ask someone else how they are doing. Volunteer. Think about someone else.

And the archive helped me do that. While I did miss my family and friends during my solitary week at the archive, spending day after day reading someone’s personal papers, letters, photographs, I felt like I was communicating (communing, perhaps?) with Abraham Joshua Heschel in a different, more personal, way than when I read his published works.

Another thing the archive helped me do was to begin journaling again, by hand. Paging through the boxes upon boxes of largely handwritten materials caused me to spend some time thinking about the materiality of handwriting, as well as the personality of that materiality, that is becoming lost as we move to a more typed-based society.

This move towards handwriting and journaling has had a therapeutic effect on my own mental health. It helps me wind down before bed, or gets me more prepared for the morning. I love it.

One of the first things I looked at while spending time at archive were some small diaries by Uncle Jacob Heschel. I couldn’t read them; they were in Yiddish and I’m not proficient in that language. However, when I gingerly opened the cover of one and took a quick glance at it, I was bowled over.

It looked exactly like a small graph-paper Moleskine cahier.

I’m very familiar with the look and feel of Moleskine’s graph paper journals because they are very often used for bullet journaling. Bullet journaling, “the analog system for the digital age” is a very popular journaling system that combines lists, personalized symbols, and a personal calendar.

The above picture is an example of a basic, no-frills bullet-journal spread. If you look closely, that journal above is comprised of graph paper, just like Uncle Jacob’s small little cahiers.

But any search of “bullet journal” or the shortened, hashtag-appropriate version “BuJo” in Pinterest or Instagram will show much more artistic and self-reflexive bullet journal spreads.

Although this image bears the hashtag #plannertip and #plannercommunity instead of the typical #bulletjournal or #bujo hashtags, I did find if on a bullet journal board on Pinterest. Here we see that the bullet journal system has now morphed into a way to combine more traditional journaling or diary writing with the scheduling of daily life. “When you’re not feeling a 100% [sic] or having a rough day, it’s always a good idea to reflect on all the things that make YOU happy!” reads the caption of this image. Others besides myself have been turning, or are being encouraged to turn to handwritten journaling as a way to feel better.

I’ve tried bullet journaling in the past, but much to my surprise, it made me less productive. I missed some appointments and deadlines because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the no-calendar calendric system of the bullet journal. Now I use a more traditional planner, but have been thinking of moving to a bullet journal for keeping track of long-term to-do lists, and for personal diary writing and journaling.

I’m not sure if I would have had the emotional energy to try journal writing (especially by hand) without looking at all the handwritten materials in the archive and deciding it might be worth it to force myself into the habit.

I feel thankful for the archive, and for Abraham Joshua Heschel, and even for Heschel’s Uncle Jacob, whose words I couldn’t even read! Thanks. Your memory helped me.

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One of my major goals of the trip was to glean as much information as I could about Sylvia Heschel (nee Straus), Abraham Joshua Heschel’s wife. I knew very little about Sylvia Heschel before going to the archive – I knew she was a concert pianist, but not much more than that.

One of my favorite books on American Judaism is called The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture 1880-1950 by Jenna Joselit Weissman. One of the things she does throughout the book is look towards pieces of material culture often overlooked by more traditional scholarship. This hermeneutic of “uncovering” previously under- or un-studied material often looks towards “women’s things”: cookbooks, synagogue gift shops, matchmaking practices, etc.

In a chapter of this book about home decorations and furnishings called Home Sweet Haym, Joselit Weissman writes:

“Most extant American Judaica [at the time, pre-WWI] possessed little aesthetic appeal; fashioned out of cheap materials like tin and inexpensive fabrics like “sleazy” white satin, American Judaica simply didn’t lend itself to being proudly displayed. […One rabbi] witheringly compared the willingness of Christian Americans to spend lavishly on Christmas tree decorations while ‘the average Jew… contends himself with the fifteen-cent tin Menorah.’ Not everyone, however, was contend with the apparent triumph of this neutral idiom of home décor. […] Seeking to make as much room for King David as for Louis Quatorse, Jewish public figures like Mathilde Schechter, a founder of the Women’s League of Conservative Judaism, and writers like Trude Weiss Rosmarin championed a new cultural understanding of style…”[1]

When I read Mathilde Schechter’s name in that paragraph above a little chill of excitement ran through me. Mathilde Schechter, beyond being one of the founders of the Women’s League of Conservative Judaism, was married to Solomon Schechter. Solomon Schechter was a significant thinker of American Conservative Judaism, one-time president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and founder of the United Synagogue of America. (More about him can be found at the Jewish Virtual Library.)

What stunned me so much about the above quote from Joselit Weissman, then, is not only its focus on material Judaica, but how she talks about Mathilde Schechter. Mathilde isn’t immediately described as being the wife of Solomon Schechter! Instead, she and her work are written about as important in their own right to American Judaism. This, I thought to myself at the time, is important. The way we write about wives is important.

And so I had the idea to try and write something about Sylvia Heschel. So, while at the archive I pulled a lot of folders with her writings, notes, and personal effects.

It was thrilling. I felt like a detective. I started to feel close to Sylvia Heschel. I started to recognize the way she doodled in the margins of her notes. I recognized her handwriting. I looked at holiday cards she had saved, letters from her family, letters of congratulations when she married Abraham. I scanned in cards, letters, and her notes that I thought might be useful to me and my research later.

It wasn’t until I was at back at my hotel after a long day of scanning, reading and feeling that I realized what I had done.

***

“How was your day?” My husband asked me on the phone. (I, like Mathilde Schechter and Sylvia Heschel, am a wife.)

“Oh, fine. I’m a little concerned about all the things I didn’t scan in about Sylvia though. I think I sort of re-created a patriarchal approach to looking at Sylvia.”

“What?”

“Well, she had all these notes about music – she was a pianist, and took advanced classes at the Manhattan School of Music – but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the notes, they were handwritten and I don’t know music theory so I sort of concentrated my research and my scanning in things which were about her role as a wife and mother and I might have been discounting her scholarly work as unimportant. But maybe it is!”

“What kind of music theory was it?” My husband asked me, interested. “I know some of that, you know. And my dad does, too…”

“Well, I’ve already told them to take the box back to storage,” I said, resigned. “I think I’ll need to plow ahead and finish the original plan for my next day here…. Next time I’m back here maybe I’ll look at those notes again. She did have an essay about religious music I copied, but it was missing a page…”

***

The next day I was continuing to sift through more cards and letters to Sylvia. Many of the envelopes had little notes or doodles on them – she was a big doodler. I got into the habit of checking the envelopes to see if there were any significant doodles or notes on them when looking over the letters. I flipped over an envelope of one of them and saw a list. “Eggs, milk, bread,” the note read. A grocery list. Part of her life as a wife and mother, relegated to the in-between and transitory place of an opened envelope: scrap paper. I sighed, and wondered to myself how much of Sylvia Heschel was a wife and mother, how much of her was a pianist, how much of her was a student. All impossible questions.

And what would she think of me, a graduate student doing archival research for the first time in my life, worrying over one of her grocery lists?

[1] Joselit Weissman, Jenna. The Wonders of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 194.

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CW: Nazism, Neo-Nazism, Swastikas

I’m currently writing this blog post from a hotel room in Durham, N.C. I’m here over Spring Break to do some archival research at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers live here, and it is an overwhelming and expansive collection. The collection guide here shows a preview of the breadth and depth of the papers in the archive.

This is my first time doing archival research. It is amazing.

It is hard for me to put into words why I like it so much, but I want to share an experience I had while here at the archive.

(I am still learning about archival research, and I know that all the unpublished material in the collection is under the copyright of Dr. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s daughter. So I won’t be sharing anything too specific here, and of course won’t be sharing any photographs or scans of my work.)

I am looking at Folder 3 of Box 19, described on the finding guide as containing

Officials documents including a Polish citizenship document tracking movement between Germany and Poland; Anmelde-Buch (enrollment book) which lists several of Heschel’s professors at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentems zu Berlin including Leo Baeck , Ismar Elbogen, and Julius Güttman; Arbeitsbuch, which lists Heschel’s professional training in Frankfurt am Main; Heschel’s Ausweiskarte (identification card) at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentems; and a certificate (Zeugnis) for the Deutches Institut für Ausländer an der Universität Berlin which attests to Heschel’s satisfactory completion of requirement at Realgymnasium in Vilna.[1]

I have earbuds in my ears and am half-listening to a podcast episode I’ve listened to about a hundred times before as I carefully, and nervously, flip through the materials. I feel a bit like an imposter. I wonder if everyone else here has done plenty of archival research before. They probably have lots of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and may even have jobs. They are probably almost done with their dissertations, and even their first books.

I smile as I look through the materials surrounding Heschel’s early academic education in Berlin. I feel almost proud of Heschel for these early academic achievements, as if I knew him personally. I continue flipping through these materials. I flip another page over and look down and – freeze.

There is a small book, it looks about the size of a passport, staring up at me. It is an official document. Arbeitsbuch, it reads. In the center of it is a crest, an eagle perched atop a swastika.

***

I knew that Heschel fled Nazi Germany. I knew this. I suppose if I had been asked if Heschel had any official documentation from the Reich, I would have shrugged and said, “Well, probably.” But seeing this document – and seeing it nestled in a folder amongst more cheerful documents about Jewish Studies in Berlin made my stomach turn.

When I gingerly touched this document I thought to myself that this was the first “authentic swastika” I had ever touched. The first swastika was on a document made by The Third Reich.

***

In the days leading up to my trip to Durham, I restarted playing the video game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. In it, the Nazis won WWII. You play a supersoldier with an artificially engineered body trying to start a revolution in the United States, which now operate as a colony of the Reich.

Image found at https://www.gamespot.com/wolfenstein-ii-the-new-colossus/images/

My husband was originally interested in the game after it generated some Internet buzz. Apparently, some White Nationalists were disturbed about a game centering on killing Nazis. Adi Robertson, writing for The Verge, published an article entitled “Watching internet Nazis get mad at Wolfenstein II is sadder than the game’s actual dystopia.”

Robertston writes:

“The saddest thing about Wolfenstein’s YouTube comments isn’t the offended white supremacists. It’s the fact that in 2017 you can write “I can’t wait to kill some Nazis in a video game” as though that’s a meaningful political stance — which is exactly what a lot of the most popular comments are about. The second saddest thing is that you’ll be proven right by someone named “Pepe Von Europa.”[2]

And it’s true that the game is very overt with its message that killing Nazis in order to overthrow their regime is moral. As Kallie Plagge writes in her review of the game:

“Above all else, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus takes a very hard stance on the righteousness of killing Nazis. It never falters, not once asking whether violent resistance is the wrong way to fight back against oppression – and the game is stronger for it.”[3]

And so, while playing the video game, I “killed” Nazis. A lot of them. And I saw a lot of swastikas. Some were on people I “killed,” others were on buildings I “crept” by, and still others were on “official” materials I “found” and “examined” in the game. Occasionally the swastikas even seem to shout out to you: all bold and startling against a bright white or black backdrop.

This swastika is different than the other swastikas in that game, I thought to myself when I saw the swastika on Heschel’s Arbeitsbuch. It’s more… subdued. The lines are thinner. It looks… ordinary. And it was ordinary, in a horrifying way. It was a piece of official documentation, and even though it had a swastika on it, it still looked like something bureaucratic, ordinary, and everyday.

And in all its ordinariness, in all its slight bizarre delicateness, it was terrifying. Much more terrifying and startling, somewhat paradoxically, that the swastikas that seem to bombard you as you play Wolfenstein II.

After I saw it, I needed to step out of the reading room and get a drink of water.

[1] Description of File 3, Box 19. Guide to the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers, 1880, 1919-1998 and undated. https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/heschelabraham/#aspace_ref478_be8

[2] Robertson, Adi. “Watching internet Nazis get mad at Wolfenstein II is sadder than the game’s actual dystopia.” The Verge. June 12, 2017. Accessed March 14 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/12/15780596/wolfenstein-2-the-new-colossus-alt-right-nazi-outrage.

[3] Plagge, Kallie. “Rise: Review of Wolfenstein II: The New Collossus.” Gamespot. October 26, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2018. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wolfenstein-2-the-new-colossus-review/1900-6416796/.

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